The Armchair Game Designer

I’m not dead! Things have been extremely busy on the non-game-design front lately. I’d give you the details, but then I’d have to stab you with blades hidden inside both of my wrists. Which brings me to today’s review, one of the most recent games to enter the prestigious List of 100. Having played and severely disliked Assassin’s Creed 1 (more so than the average player, by the looks of things), imagine my surprise when I found that this latest entry actually kinda sorta rocks.

Intro:

• There is a brief recap given of the first game, but the player is generally expected to know what has happened in the first game, picking up in medias res
• Menus in general give a sense of the science-fiction context

Getting Going:

• Getting thrown into a situation as Desmond at the start of the game was a nice touch… the player is never in any real danger, but is given a chance to feel a sense of panic and helplessness, being asked to escape from/beat up Abstergo agents without being given a chance to adapt to the controls. I thought this was a good touch, highlighting how the ‘Bleed Effect’ translates to the player’s skill, specifically as Desmond.
• Can we please stop using the “Player as an infant” gimmick? Fallout 3 was the only game to do it remotely well and the entire scene here was completely unnecessary and jarring.
• Special controls or instructions are often delivered in text during the event in progress. This makes it nigh impossible to complete certain tasks on the first attempt, since the player will be too busy reading instructions to properly complete the task. It would’ve been easier and only mildly intrusive to offer a small confirmation box at the start of such events.
• It was good to be able to spend some time with Ezio in a low-pressure situation at the start of the game, as well as in a forced high-pressure situation (forced notoriety) in order to acquaint the player with the game’s rules for both Incognito and Notorious modes.
• Ezio’s move set never seems static or stale, and there always seems to be a new trick to learn and utilize. I found most to be effective in certain circumstances, but I never once found a reason to use (or proper instructions for) the smoke bombs.
• The training ring was a very useful way to review tricks, though some of its advice should’ve been mandatory. I never would have known how to defeat enemies carrying long poles had I not chosen to train in the ring and learn the disarm technique.

Fun:

• The game was perhaps too easy, in general. Combat becomes almost laughable once you understand that counterattacks are almost always more effective and less dangerous than outright attacking, and that you can carry more healing items that God. Escaping enemies also seemed a touch too easy this time around. In Venice in particular – later in the game and thus, one would think, in a more difficult ‘level’ – I found that simply jumping into the canals and swimming away would almost always evade enemies, since for some reason enemies can’t swim.
• Curiously, the opposite can be said for certain races or timed encounters in which careful, quick free running is important. In these events, the game can become frustratingly difficult (see my criticism about the free-running controls below). One false move and one wrong jump means that you know you’ll fail the timed challenge and have to start the event again, which brings me to my next criticism…
• Unskippable cutscenes! At least give us the option to skip a scene we’ve already seen if we fail a mission!
• The flying machine has gotten a lot of criticism for only showing up once in the game, but I honestly didn’t find it to be a very fun mechanic. The idea of needing to travel from flame to flame really limited its scope and power, when all I really wanted to do was veer off, explore a bit, and perhaps knock down a few archers on a whim.
• This sounds like a laundry list of criticisms, but I found myself having a blast for the most part. Stealthy sections felt tense, I felt like a powerful badass, and running across buildings gave me a burning desire to learn Parkour.

Visuals:

• I began to train myself to look not for icons on the screen, but for tall buildings from which to scout an area. In every case, I could know with certainty that a building would offer me a vantage point without even needing to check for confirmation.
• The vivid detail of historical landmarks and the ability to explore them gave me a personal delight, having visited some of the sites personally.
• Ubisoft made much more extensive use of consistent visual cues for AC2 than for any other I’ve come across (from the infamous ‘bird crap leap’ to the white sheets to begin a free run sequence). I also found that climbable surfaces were, for the most part, readily apparent.

Intelligence:

• Enemies tended to give up their searches too easily, and it was strange that only one kind of enemy was capable of searching groups for my presence
• Enemies also tended to very obviously ‘wait their turn’ in combat
• Enemies have enough subtle variation to make battles interesting, however, but only towards the latter portion of the game. I would’ve liked a greater challenge that forced me to adapt my combat repertoire more often.
• I almost wish there were more forced Notorious portions of this game, as it was too easy to remain Incognito. Strangely, the tension of the early Notorious section felt more compelling and challenging than after gaining the ability to lower it. I would’ve placed Notoriety on a sliding scale, rather than simply have it be either ‘on’ or ‘off’. With zero notoriety, players could sprint past enemies as usual, but as the bar slowly filled, enemies would become progressively more suspicious.

Immersion:

• World feels extremely alive independent of the player’s presence, and the player alters that world in a convincing way. The game engine’s ability to render so many character models is put to very good use in populating a believable sandbox world.
• At the same time, the game always retains its grounding in a sci-fi context through its UI and menu system
• The tertiary data entries on people and places really added to a sense of authenticity. I felt as though I was playing through the most entertaining museum anywhere… where history comes alive!
• Giving players a ‘home base’ offers a sense of relief and safe haven, while also forcing the player to invest themselves in the world and truly care about it. The visible upgrading of Monteriggioni

Cameras:

• In order to sprint the player must hold down both R2 and A (on the 360), which doesn’t allow easy camera angling. This wouldn’t be a problem if not for the fact that the game automatically tilts the camera to a downward angle during sprints/gallops, obscuring the player’s periphery.
• On second thought, though, this could be by design. Focus more on where the feet are moving and limit the player’s ability to scope his surroundings during such an event. Regardless of intent, its effect on the player was frustration at the game working against him, so it should’ve been tossed.

Controls:

• Free running feels very powerful and can be incredibly useful. I did not feel the game was ‘cheating’ me out of control using this mechanic.
• However, I would’ve appreciated some visual indicator of where Ezio’s next jump would take him given the current direction of movement, perhaps in the form of a pale outline on the next pathway or a directional indicator under Ezio’s feet. On several occasions, I felt as though the controls were working against and sending me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
• Combat controls feel a bit unnecessarily complex, especially when a handful of moves seem to be all that’s needed. I especially found the grabbing mechanic to be confusing in the heat of the moment and was confused as to why I was so rarely able to pull of a ‘throat slash’ move

Ideas:

• AC2 really streamlines and nails collectibles this time around. There’s something for everyone here. Story buff? Go around cracking the codes to the conspiracy, or collect pages to the codex. Looking for phat loots? Score Altair’s armor by delving into tombs. Have too much disposable income and want to learn a bit about art? Purchase paintings. There’s even something for the sadistic completionist crowd in the form of feathers. And with the latter example as an exception, the rest are all fairly straightforward to find without feeling necessarily ‘easy’.
• The tombs in particular were a nice touch of tight design in an otherwise open world. They gave a taste of what a rigidly structured, linear mission could look like with AC’s gameplay mechanics. The linearity is not something I would necessarily want from the entire game, but it was a nice change of pace.
• Very streamlined money reward system, but it becomes far too easy to come by money in the game as time goes by, particularly with the villa
• Adding historical context was a nice touch
• Double-assassinations were an inspired idea. The feeling I got from leaping from a building to shove blades into two enemies at once never, ever got old

Memory:

• I’m very glad the game allowed for further exploration and side-mission collection after the ending, as I actually found myself wanting to spend more time inside this world Ubisoft had (re)created.
• The first game, with its future-memory-of-the-past gimmick and conspiracy theory angle, felt pretentious and unnecessary to me. With the second game, I somehow found myself hooked on the concept both as a player and from a design perspective. AC2 does a much better job of keeping you engrossed in your main environment while maintaining the presence of the external storyline. I must confess that I found myself desperately seeking more of Subject 16’s clues and piecing together the central mystery. While the main revenge story felt lackluster, the final scene, which explains Ezio’s role as prophet in an excellent twist, was a real success. From a DESIGN perspective, the ‘memory’ context serves as an excellent excuse for the designers to do things that would otherwise feel incredibly artificial. Jumps in time and place are explained by memory-hopping, while the idea of maintaining the ‘proper’ memory excuses arbitrarily blocking off certain portions of the level, preventing innocent kills, and otherwise disallowing anything the designers want to ‘forbid’.
• It’s a real credit to the central storyline of this game, its abrupt ending, and its maddeningly cryptic bonus video that I find myself waiting eagerly for the third installment.